


Your eyes are like starlight now

by 17 pansies (17pansies)



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Also very cheesy, Christmas Fluff, Clint can sing, First Kiss, M/M, SO MUCH FLUFF, Saccharine sweet, This fic should carry a diabetes warning, seriously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2013-12-09
Packaged: 2018-01-02 22:19:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/17pansies/pseuds/17%20pansies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt #15.  </p><p>Everyone in the circus got small presents at Christmas, so Clint has good memories, and he sings along with shopping-speaker Christmas carols when he thinks nobody's listening. Someone overhears and starts harmonizing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your eyes are like starlight now

The snow was starting to fall in earnest by the time the mark appeared. Clint peered through the fat white flakes and absolutely, positively did not spare a passing thought to how the tiny town square below looked like something out of a Thomas Kinkade painting or the type of picture you’d find on a sappy Christmas card.

Light spilled out of the windows of the old Baroque hotel across the square onto the new snow which had covered the old, tired grey slush. The Christmas tree in the centre, which had to be at least twenty foot tall - twenty one and a half foot, his rational mind overrode the romanticism of the moment - was perfectly shaped, bushy at the bottom rising to a neat point carefully topped by a glowing five pointed star. Cascades of lights spiralled around its sides, so very different from the fibre optic, conical monstrosities that were found back home.

Clint blinked and focused down the length of his arrow. The mark strolled through the snow, arm linked with his girlfriend and kicking up little flurries of white. 

“Hold your fire,” a quiet voice said in his ear, and he nodded imperceptibly. He had the feeling that Coulson was going to call this one a dud. The guy below didn’t look like some major big-ass dealer with fingers in the Chitauri spare parts market. The goof ball was now scooping up handfuls of snow and dumping them over his girlfriend’s head.

There was music pouring from small speakers set up outside a cafe across the street from the hotel. The mark and his slightly damp girlfriend headed that way, going inside and taking a table in the window, in full view of the whole square. Clint shifted slightly where he was laid on the roof of the church in the corner. Definitely a dud.

They may have been in Austria but the music was as generic as it ever was. The entire world had been infected by the Festive Spirit (TM), and as Nat King Cole’s roasting chestnuts gave way to Bing’s White Christmas, Clint couldn’t help himself. He was forty odd feet off the ground (forty four actually) and there was no way anyone would hear him up here. 

“Where the tree tops glisten,” he sang softly, under his breath. “And the children listen…”

It brought back so many memories. The snow and the cold seemed to melt away as images from Christmases past flitted through his head. It hadn’t been all bad, back then. They rarely had snow because the carnies made no money when the roads were blocked with white stuff, so they’d headed south, set up the show in Florida and Mississippi and New Mexico, only braving the north of the country once spring had shaken winter’s mantle off the earth’s shoulders.

White Christmas reminded him of the old barbershop quartet that used to sing in New Orleans. Carols with a twist, he thought with a smile, watching the mark and his girl sip steaming mugs of something inviting. Little presents from the bearded lady and her acrobatic girlfriend had won Clint’s affections on his first Christmas there. It turned out that even the most hardened carnies were as sentimental as Joe Public at Christmas. 

The gifts hadn’t been much, but they’d been carefully thought out and Clint remembered warm socks, books, a new wrist guard, lush bags of chocolate truffles. It hadn’t been an easy life, and as he’d grown up it had grown harder, but those first few years had given him some good memories to fall back on. His first Christmas with Nat, they’d made some even better memories, drinking scaldingly hot chocolate and ice cold vodka. He’d bought her a hand knitted beanie from a little craft stall in Central Park and it fit snugly over her shocking red hair, a thick, soft dark brown wool which she’d worn for years afterwards. 

He still had the wickedly sharp little knife in a leather sheath.

“With every Christmas card I write,” he sang. “May your days be merry-”

“And bright,” the voice in his ear sang, a fifth below. Clint’s brain stuttered to a halt, even as the smooth baritone continued. “And may all your Christmases be white.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“Either I’ve been up here too long and I’m starting to hallucinate because of hypothermia, or,” Clint said, a delighted smile breaking across his face. “You just sang to me, Coulson.”

“The mission is a dud. I’m calling this one in, Agent. Get back to ground level and I’ll meet you at the condo in twenty minutes.”

Clint hummed to himself as he swiftly packed his bow down and, one hundred and seventy nine steps down the bell tower later, he was strolling through the snow, just another tourist admiring the pretty lights and picturesque houses.

Their condo - a tiny four room, two storey safe house squeezed into a gap between two taller, older buildings on a quiet sidestreet- looked especially inviting as he approached. The downstairs light was on, three little steps cleared of snow leading up to a red front door that was adorned with a wreath. Someone knew how to blend in, he thought.

“Gaily they ring, while people sing,” Clint sang, taking the steps in a single jump and bounding into the tiny hall like an enthusiastic labrador retriever. 

“Songs of good cheer, Christmas is here,” a soft voice came from the kitchen diner. 

“You have been holding out on me, Coulson.” Clint shed his snowy jacket and left it in a heap with his backpack. The bowcase was carried through and placed on the table. “I never knew you could sing.”

“It’s classified.” 

Clint stared, hardly hearing the words. Coulson was stood at the stove, jacket over the back of the chair behind him, stirring something in a saucepan that was filling the room with the heady smells of cinnamon and red wine and cloves and-

“Are you making me mulled wine?” he asked, unable to process a Coulson in his shirt sleeves.

“I’m making us mulled wine,” Coulson replied. “It’s cold outside.”

“Baby it’s cooooold ouuuuut siiiiiide,” Clint rejoined and got a raised eyebrow for his efforts. “What, you don’t like Miss Piggy?”

Coulson choked on a laugh.

“I prefer the Tom Jones version actually.” He looked down at the pan and a little smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. “I simply must go.”

For heartbeat, Clint’s breath stalled in his lungs, but then his natural, smart ass, self kicked in and he simply couldn’t resist.

“It’s cold outside.”

“The answer is no.” Coulson’s voice was a touch lower than Clint’s and the harmony made something in Clint’s chest tingle.

“Baby, it’s cold outside,” Clint sidled closer.

“The welcome has been.”

“So lucky that you dropped in.”

“So nice and warm,” Coulson carefully poured the contents of the pan into two chunky glass tumblers with handles. 

“Look out the window at that storm.” He waved an arm at the window. A twitch of Coulson’s eyebrow made him turn and look and the sudden flurry of white against the glass made his breath catch.

“My sister will be suspicious.” Coulson handed him the glass and Clint took a sip, eyes never leaving Coulson’s. The wine was hot, sweet and aromatic and the uncharacteristically soft expression in Coulson’s eyes gave Clint the final impetus he’d been looking for, for years.

“Your lips look delicious,” Clint murmured, taking another mouthful before putting the glass down on the tiny table. “Are we really doing this now?”

“Weather forecast has heavy snow across the region.” Coulson set his glass next to Clint’s. The low lying sexual tension that had simmered away, unacknowledged, unaccepted, was now flaring in the pit of Clint’s stomach into something warm and feral. “There’s no extraction tonight.”

“There never is anyway.” Clint’s eyes were drawn to where Coulson had loosened his tie a fraction, the top button of his shirt undone and showing the hollow of his throat and a touch of soft looking hair. “Phil?” he asked, hating the tiny quaver of uncertainty he heard in his own voice.

Please don’t let Phil be fucking with him, Clint thought, frozen to the spot as Phil’s hands came up to rest on his shoulders.

“It’s the first uninterrupted moment we’ve had since Nakhchivan last month.”

“Ah.” Clint looked down. The op came back to him in snatches, brief moments of lucidity as Couls - Phil, he amended, because there was no way he could keep referring to him by his surname, not when Phil’s hands were warm and heavy and grounding on his shoulders and he was looking into those world-coloured eyes from barely two feet away - as Phil had kept Clint’s sorry ass alive and awake, preventing him from bleeding out until Nat had managed to steal a car and get them to a point just over the Iranian border and into a ‘borrowed’ Robinson 22. “Can we not put all that down to delirium?”

“You mean the part where you said that if you were going to die, you were happy that you were doing it with me as there was no one else in the world you’d rather spend your last minutes with?”

“Oh, come on, Phil,” Clint began to protest, but then the words died in his throat as Phil’s lips brushed against his. Phil’s mouth was warm and tasted sweet and spicy, and as Phil’s arms slipped down the back of Clint’s shoulders to pull him close, Clint decided that he had to revise the previous month’s declaration. Because he was very glad to be in Phil’s company and not dying, thank you very much.

“You’re still thinking too hard,” Phil murmured, and Clint grinned, feeling Phil’s lips stretch into an answering smile against his.

“There’s bound to be talk tomorrow,” Clint sang sotto, drawing a full laugh from Phil.

“Who cares?” Phil said. “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”


End file.
